Searching video surveillance streaming for relevant information is a time-consuming mission that does not always convey accurate results. A new cloud-based deep-learning search engine augments surveillance systems with natural language search capabilities across recorded video footage.

The Ella search engine, developed by IC Realtime, uses both algorithmic and deep learning tools to give any surveillance or security camera the ability to recognize objects, colors, people, vehicles, animals and more.

It was designed with the technology backbone of Camio, a startup founded by ex-Googlers who realized there could be a way to apply search to streaming video feeds. Ella makes every nanosecond of video searchable instantly, letting users type in queries like “white truck” to find every relevant clip instead of searching through hours of footage. Ella quite simply creates a Google for video.

Traditional systems only allow the user to search for events by date, time, and camera type and to return very broad results that still require sifting, according to businesswire.com. The average surveillance camera sees less than two minutes of interesting video each day despite streaming and recording 24/7.

Ella instead does the work for users to highlight the interesting events and to enable fast searches of their surveillance and security footage. From the moment Ella comes online and is connected, it begins learning and tagging objects the cameras see.

The deep learning engine lives in the cloud and comes preloaded with recognition of thousands of objects like makes and models of cars; within the first minute of being online, users can start to search their footage.

Hardware agnostic, the technology also solves the issue of limited bandwidth for any HD streaming camera or NVR. Rather than push every second of recorded video to the cloud, Ella features interest-based video compression. Based on machine learning algorithms that recognize patterns of motion in each camera scene to recognize what is interesting within each scene, Ella will only record in HD when it recognizes something important. The uninteresting events are still stored in a low-resolution time-lapse format, so they provide 24×7 continuous security coverage without using up valuable bandwidth.

Ella works with both existing DIY and professionally installed surveillance and security cameras and is comprised of an on-premise video gateway device and the cloud platform subscription.